And suddenly, Foursquare was being predicted as not just the Next Big Thing, but THE Big Thing for social media. Also know as, The Application That Will Actually Make Money.*

Interestingly – and I could be wrong about this – foursquare seems to be the one social media tool which has taken off with a wider age base and NOT the Gen Y crowd.** If I asked a dozen of my friends, ‘are you on foursquare?’ they’d look at me:

a) like I’m crazy

b) and ask me why you’d want to share that kind of information with strangers in the first place.

But now that they’ve signed with MTV (what??) and they’ve made it into the news across the world, it looks like this is one app I can no longer avoid.

And so we come to this…

…the elusive superswarm badge.

Now, I’m told you can get one of these by having 50 people or more ‘check-in’ to a place at once. As you may know, on June 2 Ogilvy Melbourne decided to go for the world record for the number of check-ins at their office – unsuccessful, but still the first Australian location to get the yellow jersey badge.

Well, somebody at Ogilvy loves foursquare, because they’re using it to bring the blogger reward meet-up to the next level.

For those playing at home, a foursquare mayor is the person with the most check-ins for a location. They get a badge too:

It looks something like this. Not embroidered of course, but the fact that you can now buy these babies is a scary concept.

The foursquare mayor concept is an interesting one in itself, encouraging more check-ins and allowing venues to see who their most loyal tech-savvy customers are. But the fact that Microsoft is specifically targeting mayors – is this a way of trying to separate the influencers from the rest of the pack?

[I wonder if any of this came out of the Microsoft Protegé competition?]

Well, if you’re in Sydney and you want to meet some other foursquarers (or is there a cooler term I’m not aware of?) here’s the details:

You only need to be one of the first 111 foursquare mayors to check-in to be in the running for free software, and the t-shirts are free game for everyone, so why not?

Now to get me a foursquare account…

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* Their growth at least seems more credible than Twitter’s, as there’s less potential for robots called Britney1691 who are lonely tonight.

** Although Twitter has also seen limited success among Gen Ys I’ve talked to, it has a much higher awareness rate.